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Encyclopædia Britannica claims the earliest known rodents come from the upper Paleocene (supposedly about 57 million years ago) of North America, yet it admits these animals ‘had already acquired all of the diagnostic features of the order.’ In other words, these ‘early’ animals were easily recognizable as rodents.

Today I am not delving into any further articles, just into (at least mainly) that one paragraph.

If the claim is “the earliest rodents are from Upper Palaeocene” that reads as (I suppose the info is already outdated) “we have found more recent rodents in [making example up] Miocene and Oligocene, but no older rodents in Cretaceous or Jurassic”.

I am not sure there have been no rodents found in Cretaceous since that article was written, but the point is that if Palaeocene, Miocene, Oligocene, on the one hand, and Cretaceous, Jurassic on the other hand are not ordered on a time scale, the real reading is of course “we have found rodents in some types of fossil biotopes, but not in others.”

Rats are on the evolutionist view an indicator of age Palaeocene to “later” biotopes. Triceratops of Cretaceous or perhaps “earlier back to” Jurassic biotopes.

If Rats and Triceratops were ever to be found together (perhaps it has happened since article of Enc. Brit. was written), a palaeontologist who believes that Palaeocene, Cretaceous, and the rest of them, are time periods, would have three choices:

1) Rodents being older than thought. Like from Cretaceous on. (I think this might be what has taken place after such or roughly similar finds, so that “small mammals” – that could mean rodents – have now been documented “since” the Cretaceous).

2) Triceratops hanging on longer than thought. Logically this would be as possible, but palaeontologists would be wary of this kind of thing. Pal Ul Don is supposed to be Edgar Rice Burrough’s SciFi/Fantasy land, not sth one could really come across. Cryptozoologists would not be against this for this reason, but they are hardly ever asked on their opinion when it comes to geochronology.

3) Misplaced fossils. A Classic. Find a hammer deep down incrusted in coal that is supposed to be from Carboniferous or sth, and oh boy, are they eager to say “it must have fallen down from miners later on”. Even if that is either:

a) problematic in explanation for the incrusting which would have been abnormally fast, if fossilisation and such like processes take as long as they claim, OR

b) problematic in proving of the long ages of other things, if incrusting and suchlike processes take as short as the “misplaced coal miner’s hammer” theory would have it.

The fourth choice – which they systematically avoid – is saying that Palaeocene and Cretaceous were never different time periods anyway. Because if all the fossil Lagerstätten from all these “time labels” are simultaneous, oh boy are we back at solid proof for Noah’s Flood.

Actually, I am delving into another paragraph of that essay of hers:

Comprising 50% of all mammal species, rodents should be prolific in the fossil record, and evolutionists should expect to find numerous examples of transitional species. …

Did you just hear that?

Comprising 50% of all mammal species, rodents … OK, rodents are among only themselves, 50% of all mammalian species? But how many different kinds are rodents? Here we have a situation which gives added feasibility to Noah’s Ark. How many pairs of rodents were there on board? Half the number of the mammals on board, or far fewer? Rodents are pretty unique among mammals when it comes to speciation through varied chromosome numbers. I hold – against P. Z. Myers – that even they can only vary it downwards. But this is one key to understanding how Noah’s Ark could float and was not a crowded prison train or slaughterhouse train or slave ship leaving half the inmates dead before arrival.

My blogs have here and there an apologetic dimension, but these ones are dedicated to apologetics, more or less totally. I consider the latest one, Great Bishop of Geneva, very important insofar as Calvin challenged the Liberty of God by denying Transsubstantiation, as well as the Liberty of Man by denying freewill. These denials lead to further limitations of God’s Omnipotence, such as Evolutionism, Heliocentrism and most radically Atheism, but also to further limitations of man’s liberty and liberties – whether by Locke or by Marx or by Freud. Or by usurers. Or shrinks. Or … well a lot of guys I take on in my other blogs:

The fact that a certain kind of Protestantism agrees with Creationism does not make me a Protestant. I am Catholic. Or possibly Cathodox, but more Latin than Greek. The fact that a certain kind of Judaism agrees with Creationism does not make me Jew. I am Christian.

The reason why I limit the English messages on this blog to Creationism is that it is a big subject, huge enough for one blog entirely, and that I have written elsewhere in English on say Geocentrism or why the Reformation was bad. Broad hint: it started out with desecration of relics, i e Saints’ Bones, like the destructions of Muslim Saints’ Tombs in Mali before Ramadan 2012. In England (where, like in Sweden, it was preceded by a period of not yet decidedly Protestant schism) it also led up to the tyranny of Oliver Cromwell, in its most radical form, and Oliver Cromwell like the Mali Neo-Muslims after Ramadan 2012 forbade public music making and theatre.

I give a French page where I collect messages on Creationism, but also Theory of Knowledge and Geocentrism (it includes a Geocentric series where I make observations on Laplace among other things), and the messages are over all fewer, because French are less given than English speaking US Americans to public internet debate in these issues. I have simply found less open and reasoned opposition to answer to in French.

Here is a post where I start out with the fact that Geocentrism like Creationism are socially outsider positions, get on about causalities and far off in comment section nearly finish off about what could have but as far as the public knows has not been verified about parallax from Mars. I refer to it as “cagasuamfobdis”, which is part of url and acronym for title:

If you look for a key word, use the English language for my main blog. It also includes three others, one French only (French key words) on comic books and one musical and one cookery / home made artistics / practical.

Enjoy the reading, if you enjoy it, and if you do not, leave it to others and do not decide to exclude anyone from those “others”, please.

If you want to publish on paper, treat it juridically as a reprint with my blogs (most of them, including this one, exceptions are noted on blog or index of blogs) as primary publication, according to conditions in English Further Use Note section of the first index:

The pdf here is a preview, as I access it, and for aaccessing a full view I would be required to make a payment. Here is the text of the preview:

IT is generally agreed that stable membranes were prerequisite to the assembly of the earliest self-replicating systems1–4. Phospholipids, which are ubiquitous in biological membranes and which self-assemble in aqueous environments into stable lipid bilayers and vesicles4, are obvious candidates for prebiotic membrane components. We report here the abiotic synthesis of various lipids, including membranogenic phospholipids.

To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).

Now, the abiotic synthesis of lipids described in the hidden away article might be compatible with the conditions thought to have prevailed in the primitive atmosphere, as is assumed for parallel with the Miller Urey experiment.

Then again the conditions for that prebiotic or abiotic synthesis of phospholipids might also not be compatible with it.

In the latter case my conclusion stands.

In the former case, why has the information not trickled down to textbooks between 1977 and the present day?

Why is Nature not flaunting the article openly as a prime piece of evidence that abiogenesis is indeed possible?

Maybe for the same reason why three of the four links that Jonathan Sarfati gave (excepting the link to a mere resumé) disappeared from the sites of his sources. Maybe there as here the facts when better looked into show up abiogenesis as being as impossible as ever before. That is one guess. Another guess would be that Nature considers this kind of information to be too advanced for the common public. They want an exclusive and half esoteric readership. And a third guess is that the publication might be in the kind of trouble that makes them turn every penny and beware of generosities.

Here is the info about access:

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Somehow the conditions on Creation . com seem a bit more generous. However that comes to be.

Anyway, I have been confronted with the report that abiotic synthesis of phospholipids is possible, I have had no substantiation that this report has stood the time since when it was made.

Phospholipid synthesis occurs in the cytosol adjacent to ER membrane that is studded with proteins that act in synthesis (GPAT and LPAAT acyl transferases, phosphatase and choline phosphotransferase) and allocation (flippase and floppase). Eventually a vesicle will bud off from the ER containing phospholipids destined for the cytoplasmic cellular membrane on its exterior leaflet and phospholipids destined for the exoplasmic cellular membrane on its inner leaflet.[8]

Common sources of industrially produced phospholipids are soya, rapeseed, sunflower, chicken eggs, bovine milk, fish eggs etc. Each source has a unique profile of individual phospholipid species and consequently differing applications in food, nutrition, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and drug delivery.

Can objective moral values be ascertained by someone not believing there is a God?

In theory a Christian would usually say yes.

In practise, I find that such and such a guy not believing there is a God tends to miss objective moral values as well.

I just had a debate with you about slavery in which you very obviously had the alignment “lawful stupid”. Slavery is bad, ergo God had to forbid it totally and had no right to use any other tactics involving partial toleration of that bad thing. Otherwise God is bad too.

But this is beyond “lawful stupid”, this is absurd:

Husbands and wives [according to you] have the same right to refuse each other sex as they have in respect to total strangers, and have the same right to have consenting sex with total strangers as with their husbands and wives, anything else is rape.

OK, in theory you can perhaps ascertain objective moral values without believing in God, but in practise you are not convincing me.

And Dawkins has the same problem. When he advocates medical abortion one of his arguments is that that is what is currently being done.

OK? Once upon a time slavery was also currently being done.

That a thing is currently done does not prove it good.

Of abortion (including of handicapped already known to be such) and slavery, it is arguable slavery was worthy of more toleration and abortion of less, rather than reverse. A slave can be liberated. An aborted child cannot be resurrected except God make a miracle.

M McQuarrie

The only thing you need for objective moral values is a recognized definition of morality and I have that.

And action can be considered moral if it maximizes happiness, health or well being or minimizes unnecessary suffering or harm. Conversely, an action can be considered immoral if it minimizes happiness, health or well being or maximizes unnecessary suffering or harm.

So where does god ever recognize that definition of morality?

What part of believing in god is required to recognize that definition of morality?

What moral action can you do because you believe in god that I cannot do because I do not believe in god?

“Husbands and wives have the same right to refuse each other sex as they have in respect to total strangers, and have the same right to have consenting sex with total strangers as with their husbands and wives, anything else is rape.”

Not according to your bible. [I was resuming his position, ending with “anything else is rape”, not mine.]

And why should that be contingent on their genders?

+Hans-Georg Lundahl As for Dawkins, well I really don’t give a crap about what he thinks on matters that aren’t related to biology. He’s biologist. When he talks science, that’s when I take him at his word. Anything else he says I take on a circumstantial basis. If he says something I don’t agree with, I’ll disagree with him. What’s that got to do with anything?

“Once upon a time slavery was also currently being done”

Do you not know how to speak English?

Once upon a time, slavery was accepted. That never made it moral. [Which was my point, I sadly missed to exploit this admission.] In a secular movement, society gradually deemed slavery to be immoral based on the harm it caused. Society still does and we collectively view slavery as abhorrent based on the harm it causes which can be empirically measured.

So why hasn’t your bible changed? And why does it still not say “you will not own slaves?”

“it is arguable slavery was worthy of more toleration and abortion of less”

I fail to see how. I am still undecided on the abortion issue but slavery as a practise causes more harm to individuals and society as a whole.

But while we are on the subject of abortion, read Numbers 5:11-21. That’s your god condoning an abortion.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Yes, exactly according to my Bible. [Had forgotten he was referring to my resumé or rather looked to hastily at it.] The one passage which DOES outline the sexual rights of the sexes is I Cor. VII:3-5.

What you propose is so general it is inane. I meant you have shown no talent applying it. Nor about weighing pain and happiness when they go together.

M McQuarrie

+Hans-Georg Lundahl Verse 4 says it best: “The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife”

This is not equality or sexual rights of any kind. This is subjugation.

“In a secular movement, society gradually deemed slavery to be immoral based on the harm it caused.”

Simply not true.

M McQuarrie

+Hans-Georg Lundahl The United States of America.

+Hans-Georg Lundahl“Slavery was not just accepted, it was being done, or practised if you prefer the Latin word.

And I mean WIDELY.”

How does that make it better?

[My original point would have been, it didn’t, and so a widely practised thing is not necessarily moral, but atheism offers no objective basis beyond that.]

“The Bible was written in those times and for times including such as repeated that.”

You are not making any sense.

Construct an actual sentence.

[OK, what about this one: The Bible was written in those times and for times including but not limited to such times as repeated that widespread practise of slavery – was my sentence really too short for him?].

“Numbers 5 is not referring to an abortion”

It’s referring to the termination of a foetus. That’s an abortion isn’t it?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Numbers 5 is NOT referring to the termination of a foetus. It is referring to the death of an adulteress if guilty and death of noone if she was innocent.

I am sorry your grammar skills suck so much you cannot recognise an actual sentence when it slaps you in the face.

As said, slavery was practised or done too widely and this has been repeated in other forms in XXth C. for God simply to abolish the horror just by forbidding it.

God has for times when slavery is not abolished given instructions on how to humanise it. Humanising masters and rehumanising slaves.

M McQuarrie

+Hans-Georg Lundahl“It is referring to the death of an adulteress if guilty and death of noone if she was innocent.”

and also the death of the unborn child within her (which is an abortion)

and you just admitted your bible condones the death women who, for any reason, had sex with someone who was not their husband.

Explain how that is moral?

“…for God simply to abolish the horror just by forbidding it.”

WHY THE FUCK NOT? HE’S GOD ISN’T HE?

Why has humanity had to do all the work to abolish slavery? Why does god get all the credit when it hasn’t done anything to discourage or abolish slavery?

“God has for times when slavery is not abolished given instructions on how to humanise it.”

Including outlining in the bible who may be bought as a slave, who may be sold as a slave, how a slave may be passed down like a possession and how severely a slave may be beaten. Yeah, god’s done a lot of work to “humanise slavery.”

Hans-Georg Lundahl

key word “also”. That is not abortion per se.

There is a change because there is a change of testaments. You know the adulteress in John 8?

God has slowly made abolishing slavery possible – for Christian societies. For XXth C. we have seen new slaveries introduced by secularised society. Slaveries without the limitations you cavil so much against. School compulsion, taking away children from parents, psychiatry, sterilising gipsies and natives … way beyond what the Bible condones a master doing to his slaves. Way beyond. Far worse violence than was imaginable in the 13th C. When people were still Christians.

No, it is humanity which has done a very bad job, not God.

M McQuarrie

[Omitting but noting a blasphemy against “my” God “and everything it stands for.”]

It seems some people who read Assorted retorts blog and its precursors on the MSN Group Antimodernism think either I hallucinated the opponents (no, they are real users either of forums like yahoo boards and netscape boards or of youtube, and now I am most often on youtube, I try to link to the users I dialogue with to document that) or made them up as strawmen so my arguments could shine brighter.

That is simply not so. One part of why the dialogues from the earlier boards do not seem real is that I cut up answer after answer into its aspect and then put the strands after each other instead of beside each other. This does less justice to the spontaneous repartees, where one opponent might enumerate three reasons together against my position, and on the blog they show up only one by one, separated by series of answers.

On youtube the situation is the opposite. I have when answering, and sometimes my opponents too have when answering, a need to write two answers, either one answering the other or both answering the one one is dialoguing with, so that a lengthy answer can show up in full. When I do so, on the blog I put the two or three or sometimes more 500-sign limited answers into one answer without showing the borders between them.

But there is another thing. A man can look really stupid if you answer him and a bit later he repeats the mistake you just answered. However, in real time of the debate, there might have been, say, three weeks between, say, gregrutz taking up first supposed flat earth cosmology of Bible and then geocentric one and my answering first with flat earth not being in the verses he thinks and then that I believe geocentrism one time (three weeks ago) and doing so the next time (last 22 hours). He has had time to either forget my reply or loose it so he has to repeat the point in order to make another one on top of it today. So, when you read it five minutes after another, he seems more stupid than he really is.

This should eliminate any doubt as to whether these dialogues have really been taking place over the internet. They have. With real people on both ends, and no extraterrestrials in sight so far.

As for the positions in my answers, they are my real ones. I am not sure if it is very common to be able consistently to fake such a thing, I think not, and in case it were, I think I would not enjoy it, as I feel awkward about lying.

“He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers.”

I can draw a circle on a flat piece of paper, they are 2 Dimensional. FLAT.

Hans-Georg Lundahl (continued below)

You can also draw a circle on a globe. Geographers draw lots of them on the globe representing the earth.

Polar circles (N & S), Equator and all their Parallels.

Paris, Greenwich, and all other Meridians.

All of these are circles and on﻿ a globe. …

gregrutz

”You can also draw a circle on a globe” So what?

”He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth”

Everyone back then thought the earth was flat including the men who wrote﻿ the bible.

When you see a globe from across the room, does it look like a sphere or a circle? ID-iot.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

It looks like a sphere with lots of circles on it.

The Hebrew word seems to be translatable as globe too.

Isaiah 40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the globe of the earth, and﻿ the inhabitants thereof are as locusts: *he that stretcheth out the heavens as nothing, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in. (Douay Rheims version).

Different languages have different frontiers between word meanings. Hebrew has a word meaning both circle and globe. In English I suppose it would be “the round”.

And:

gregrutz

You, like all creatards, give a model that you made up to support your bible stories. You rambeled on and showed no evidence.

Biblical references Psalm 93:1, 96:10, and﻿ 1 Chronicles 16:30 include text stating that “the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved.” Psalm 104:5 says, “the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.”

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Yes, I believe the﻿ Earth is still in the middle of the universe and is never moved.

My whole point is I give a model showing how modern astronomy could very well be wrong. My point is astronomy has NEITHER proven heliocentrism NOR distant starlight problem for a young universe.

Second time:

gregrutz

Does the bible﻿ say there was a global flood? Then it is wrong.

Isaiah 40 : 22-24

“He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers.”

I can draw a circle on a flat piece of paper, they are 2 Dimensional. FLAT.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

The word can also be translated globe. NON-FLAT.

I think it﻿ was you who brought this up some weeks ago, have you already forgotten my refutation?

And:

gregrutz (third answer to “real reasoning”)

When did﻿ bible packers start using logic? LOL

Biblical references Psalm 93:1, 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 include text stating that “the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved.”

In the same manner, Psalm 104:5 says, “the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.”

Further, Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that “And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place”.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

If you recall a few weeks ago, I answered this is not wrong.

In case of flat earth﻿ it is wrong, but not attested by the Bible.

In case of stable earth and sun moving around it daily, it is attested by the Bible (most clearly in Joshua), but not proven wrong so far.

We went through that three weeks ago, why should I have changed my mind on either since then?